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Main Tutorial Basic Tasks Printing

# Tutorial Exercise 1.4: Printing a Graph Visualization

You can print a graph on a PostScript® printer directly from uDraw(Graph) to get the current layout on paper. For this operation the print dialog window is needed which will appear after selecting menu File/Print... (or by pressing the printer button of the icon bar).

But this time we will use the keyboard instead of the mouse for choosing this menu operation. Press the keys ALT and f simultaneously which is usually written as ALT+F. This will open the File menu. f is the underlined character (mnemonic) of the "File" menu, the keyboard equivalent for mouseless operation. After opening the menu with these two keys, you can navigate through all menus with the four cursor keys of the keyboard. By pressing the RETURN (or ENTER) key, you select the currently highlighted menu entry. In an opened menu, you have another option to choose from a menu by pressing the mnemonic character (at this time without the ALT key!) of one of the shown menu entries. For example, when the "File" menu is open, you select the Print... entry by pressing the p key. So the overall keyboard command to select this particular menu from start is ALT+F P (upper case letters are not significant here, so do not use the SHIFT key here). You can read more about keyboard usage by following this reference.

After opening the print dialog window with one of the methods described above, you have the opportunity to set some options before the file is actually printed. Let us assume that you want to print the currently loaded graph on one of the PostScript® printers in your network. First of all, you need to know the command used for printing PostScript® files at your site. For example, if you usually use the UNIX® command

lpr -P our_ps_printer my_file.ps

to print file my_file.ps on printer our_ps_printer, you have to enter "lpr -P our_ps_printer" in the "Print Command" field of the print dialog. Please read the print options if you are not sure what to enter here, especially on a Windows® platform.

Be sure that you have set the correct page size supported by your printer. If this is not the default format A4 then choose another setting with the "Page Size" option button and press the "Fit to Page" button afterwards to ensure that the graph will be completely visible and centered on the paper. Finally, you can send the graph in PostScript® format to the printer by pressing the print push button.

End of Exercise 1.4. Go back to the Section 1 Overview.